The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for a reliable multicast broadcast in a wireless network.
Multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computing devices simultaneously in a single transmission from the source. Multicast is most commonly implemented in IP multicast, which is often employed in Internet Protocol (IP) applications of streaming media and Internet television. IP multicast is a technique for one-to-many and many-to-many real-time communication over an IP infrastructure in a network. IP multicast scales to a larger receiver population by requiring neither prior knowledge of a receiver's identity nor prior knowledge of the number of receivers. Multicast uses network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network (typically network switches and routers) take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers such that messages are sent over each link of the network only once.